PhD Candidates Nonnenmacher and Naismith Present Collaborative Research Project

“Her dreadful plight”: A mixed-methods analysis of the multiword expression poor thing

Curiously, the English multiword expression poor thing often refers to entities that are neither economically impoverished nor inanimate objects. By using a mixed-methods corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approach, we demonstrate that poor thing functions as an expression of affective stance (Jaffe, 2009; Kiesling, 2018), based on evidence from two American English corpora. In cases where the social identities of speakers and referents can be determined, poor thing is frequently used by women and in reference to women, children, or animals. Additionally, the expression may refer to entities of low vitality due to illness or death. Our results indicate that poor thing conveys a complex social meaning (Eckert, 2019) by simultaneously indexing a speaker’s compassionate stance and a referent’s misfortune. We discuss the potential of computational sociolinguistic investigations of this nature which analyze relatively infrequent lexical expressions that, nonetheless, have recognizable social meaning for speakers.

Key words: Corpus analysis; Discourse analysis; Poor thing; Stance; Social meaning

References:

Eckert, P. (2019). The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority. Language, 95(4), 751-776.

Jaffe, A. (Ed.). (2009). Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Kiesling, S. F. (2018). Masculine stances and the linguistics of affect: On masculine ease. Norma, 13(3-4), 191-212.